That sounds more believable, Synova. $500,000 --- well, I have no idea what's involved. But either amount was unfair. She wasn't a rich woman.She freakin' saved his campaign and then he blew it all by his ridiculous self.

Haven't the Palin bashers from the McCain campaign figured out yet that whatever they say about Palin comes back at them in spades? So, "Palin's an asshole", say the disgruntled McCainiacs. My question: "What does that say about you guys that you chose an asshole as your VP candidate?"

McCain was a military officer, and he knows everthing that goes wrong in his chain of command is his fault, one way or another. He should have publicly rebuked the members of his campaign who went after her, since he could only lose from the squabble.

The pity party begins. I love that despite all of the evidence that she's an annoying dope, that her supporters can't even contemplate that she might be the one with the problem. Plus she lies a whooole lot.

The entire McCain operation, save for a few of the good folks who didn't walk around polishing their resumes, wore Clown Shoes. Palin was the only smart move McCain made, and it would have worked but for the objective fact of the economy and the trend against the Republicans in 2008.

Now the voters realize that they voted a con man into office, and they are coming to terms with the fact that they don't like it at all. Plus, the whole National Bankruptcy thing won't go down well for the Democrats.

John McCain treated her badly during the campaign and after, IMO. He really disgusted me and I feel pretty badly about voting for him. Not badly enough to ever have voted for O, but bad enough.

The after part, particularly. She was all that kept him from being the Barry Goldwater of the 21st Century. He couldn't deliver the independents, she delivered the undecideds.

ricpic said...

Even in that short clip with Oprama she comes across as likeable. The libs are pissing their pants over her.

Oprama? Very good, ric.

If anyone needs to know how badly the Lefties fear her, listen to garage, Montagne, and the rest of the usual suspects trying to sound superior. The phrase, "whistling in the graveyard", comes to mind.

Frum's argument seems to be that since the MSM was successful in convincing a lot of non-political people mostly in the middle that Sarah Palin was unqualified to be VP, that she was, indeed, unqualified. But this is the same MSM that convinced the same group of people that Barack Obama was qualified to be President, despite having fewer qualifications than Palin had (and, esp. we are discovering now, temperament and judgment), despite her being the VP, and not Presidential candidate.

So, what we ended up with was the least qualified President since, well, probably the 19th Century, at a time when the consequences of electing someone to that post are higher than ever.

Let me note that when I was criticizing Obama's qualifications, I was talking qualifications on paper. While he is also turning out to not have the temperament nor the judgment for the job, there are those in the last 50 years, like Jimmy Carter, who are probably even worse in that regard.

I think that part of why a lot of people love Sarah Palin is that she is the one politician on the right who causes pretty much the entire left to go just batshit crazy.

And part of that may be that she is an anti-elitist, quite possibly carrying on the tradition of Andrew Jackson and William Jennings Bryant.

Many of those running the country right now claim legitimacy through their Ivy League (in particular) credentials. And, indeed, what credentials did Obama have besides an Ivy League education and the color of his skin? And, yet, that was supposed to trump Annapolis, better than 20 years in uniform, rising to be a naval captain, offered flag rank, attended war college, and several decades in the Senate. All because Obama went to Columbia and Harvard (and, apparently the fact that he was almost assuredly an AA admit is irrelevant).

Again, we apparently now have the best and the brightest running this country, and Bill Buckley was right about the phone book being a better guide to competence.

Sarah Palin has the effrontery to not take her place at the back of the bus because she did not graduate from an Ivy League school.

There has always been an anti-elitist strain in this country. And, it seems to come out most when the elites become the most arrogant. They are arrogant right now, and so Palin's anti-elitism is resonating with a lot of people right now.

Frum's argument seems to be that since the MSM was successful in convincing a lot of non-political people mostly in the middle that Sarah Palin was unqualified to be VP, that she was, indeed, unqualified. But this is the same MSM that convinced the same group of people that Barack Obama was qualified to be President, despite having fewer qualifications than Palin had (and, esp. we are discovering now, temperament and judgment), despite her being the VP, and not Presidential candidate.

Hammer, nail, head. This very neatly encapsulates my major heartburn with the 2008 election.

As for the legal bills, here's what happened: she ran up a total of $500,000 in legal fees in the last year or so, mostly, from dealing with frivolous ethics complaints, but $50,000 in personal legal fees relating to her vetting and the 2008 campaign. I think she probably thought that the campaign would cover those fees, but the campaign never got a specific request to do so, so there is some confusion and misunderstanding on both sides. I doubt there's more to it than that.

How on earth can the McCain campaign justify billing Palin for their costs incurred in vetting her, be they 5K, 50K, or 500K?

They didn't bill her anything. She hired her own lawyers to assist in the document production and questionnaire answering. Ideally, the campaign would have helped her pay those fees, but I understand there was a miscommunication on that issue.

Palin attracted a ton of heat from democrat lawyers. The Mccain campaign should have had her back, simply as a facet of wanting to win. They knew she wasn't a millionaire.

I'm not surprised some Mccain staffer can't find a way to dispute Palin's account... after all, this is a legal bill, and it can be characterized in many ways because it probably encompassed a range of things.

But Presidential campaigns have often involved legal disputes, and they either should have picked up someone who could afford them, or helped Palin with the bill.

Given how the AP screwed up the actual cost by a huge factor, and is clearly trying to stir the pot, I don't think they are trustworthy. People who set out only to stir the pot are not reliable.

I am certain that nothing would please Ploufe and Axelrod more than to see Republicans, conservatives and tea-party protesters rally around Palin and nominate her for a 2012 run."

This is such a boring argument. If Palin can beat the rest of the GOP's candidates for the nomination, then she will have proven to be formidable indeed. She obviously has the dumb 'it' factor that our nation craves. I hope we find someone with much more executive experience, as Obama is proving how horrible it is to be unready to lead the US government.

But if you really think Palin is the worst candidate the GOP can come up with, you're dreaming. She's very smart, has won very hard elections, and is an honest to goodness post partisan reformer. She is far, far more powerful now than Obama was in 2005. The 2012 GOP does not look to have many good candidates, and Palin may be the best. Lucky for them, they are running against Obama.

I just think we can find a better candidate. We'll have a nomination process that will show if that's the case.

Look at Mccain... a pretty bad candidate. But he beat all those other candidates because they all sucked more. And they really did. Rudy and Fred ran terrible campaigns. The others were fake or stupid.

I can see: Unqualified. Too far to the right. Sucks at network interviews.

But she's always struck me as a very decent person, so I don't know why her foes feel the need to also call her a liar. Not all of these Palin foes has Andrew Sullivan's weird fetishistic panic about her, do they?

Most of the supposed lies I've seen attributed to her are normal political exaggerations or parsing, of a kind very familiar to those who have followed the careers of, oh, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Al Gore, John Kerry and Barack Obama to name a few. She was for the Bridge to Nowhere before she was against it, for example. But what else?

A safe Republican seat? The whole point of appointing McHugh to the Secretary of the Army position was to get that seat. They wouldn't have done it if they didn't think they could win it pretty handily.

Nominate her!Yes, It would be true red meat. I for one would love to watch her "show" all over again. If Republicanstruly want to line up behind her and "all she stands for", they should. It might be educational for Democrats to understand how it feels to see the opposition support an empty suit. She just flames, and deflects blame. Oh yeah, she would be awesome.Sarah!

Palin is not an intellectual but I have no doubt she's smart. And her smarts are being shown in the last year as she has stayed in the news despite the opposition of the media and the Republican establishment.

Her creativity in getting out her own message and beginning the process of re-creating her image certainly shows an imagination that far surpasses Huckabee, Pawlenty, Romney.

She's also quite smart enough to go out those particular people with the strongest critiques, thus cutting their critiques off for the most part.

And there is absolutely no doubt that she knows her biggest failure, her most defining moments, came in the television interviews.

This book is a start, but I strongly suspect she has long been training for the new batch of interviews. She's much smarter than she's been given credit for, and I think significantly more determined than a lot of people will know what to do with.

...now I'm getting images in my mind of Palin practicing debates in old barns and in the snow, lifting up carts like Rocky in Rocky IV. "She's not human. She's like a piece of iron."

My memory is that RINO candidates are always approved of inexalting personal stories and favorable histories...until nomination. After nomination they are ripped to shreds as weak and two faced losers who will forever be totally without appeal to anyone with a normal viewpoint. Sarah is going thru step two like she is already nominated. The Democrat illusionists Line has been short circuited. She is inside their COBA. A Facebook message by Palin today has become the scariest part of life for the Illusionists from Illinois.

"If anything, the left sees Palin as one of the best things that is happening to the Republican party. She is helping it self-destruct."

Bullshit.

McCain was the 'destroy-from-within' candidate favored by the left, because he was a terrible candidate, not conservative, and easily pressured by Democrats to vote just like them. If he had won, Dems wouldn't have been too far from Obama.

A 'maverick' is just a RINO.

If Palin were 'favored' by the left as some Manchurian candidate bent on destroying the GOP, they would be shutting the hell up about her, putting her in the usual media shows, and writing glowing editorials.

That the left openly despise her shows you are completely and utterly wrong.

I think that part of why a lot of people love Sarah Palin is that she is the one politician on the right who causes pretty much the entire left to go just batshit crazy.

This. I’m not one of the people who love her to death, but I don’t hate her either and it was/is fascinating to watch the way she affects people. I mean, a bunch of people went completely batshit crazy regarding her during the campaign. And they still kind of twitch when she does or says anything. She gets responses from the President of the United States from a post on facebook. Love her or hate her, the whole thing has been massively interesting.

Thanks for the 50k correction. That makes a lot more sense. Still shitty of McCain.

Please tell us what an "intellectual" is and why Palin isn't one. I've found that most people referred to as intellectuals are not much more than people who can quote from books. The more arcane the book, the more supposedly intellectual.

I'll just repeat what I've said in the past. I think Palin joined the McCain campaign ready to fight, then realized with dismay what a mess it was, and that McCain's heart wasn't in it anymore: he did *not* want to be the guy who prevented the first black president from being elected. Being loved by the media as a RINO maverick was just too important to him.

It didn't seem like he was even trying at the end. I remember him actually defending Obama when crowds at his stump speeches would express fears about socialism and government takeovers under an Obama administration. Now look where we are. Horrible candidate, horrible campaign. And now we're all paying for it, not just Palin.

Oligonicella, your impression is pretty close to my own. I've spent a fair amount of time in the halls of academia, and a fair amount of time outside of them. Far too often, people equate "smart" with a focus on high education, and the various ways to impress people in higher education.

I see an intellectual as being a smart person who has focused their intelligence in the direction of academic learning, and sees their contribution in terms of their mastery of some field of book learning. Not all intellectuals are really that smart, though. It's just a way of approaching an identity.

Some of the smartest people I know have little or nothing to do with academia. They use their very strong intelligence in other ways. Far too often, being smart is assumed to be the same as intellectual. So, if someone is not an intellectual--honed in the ways of increasing academics--they are dismissed as being dumb. What's interesting is that a lot of this dismissal does not come from intellectuals but from non-intellectuals who over-estimate academics and see that one expression as being a sign of intelligence.

Pastors, for instance, used to assert a power (and still often do) because they were the most educated, even as they were often not the smartest or most astute in the relevant fields.

Being smart without being an intellectual is a trait valued in the West.

Intellectual- a : of or relating to the intellect or its use b : developed or chiefly guided by the intellect rather than by emotion or experience : rational c : requiring use of the intellect 2 a : given to study, reflection, and speculation b : engaged in activity requiring the creative use of the intellect

I doubt that a woman whose single best policy prescription is "Drill, baby, drill", who required almost a half-dozen colleges to graduate school and who finds former morning show anchor Katie Couric an intimidating presence would be considered an "intellectual" by any sense or interpretation of the word. Now if your definition involves winking, rambling sentences and an aversion to using periods in your sentences, she might fit your bill.

Smart people understand language enough to use it with nuance and distinction.

Intellectuals who are not smart are easily trapped in conventional categories which may to them seem as intelligent.

Smart people are creative learners who apply intelligence in multiple directions.

Intellectuals see their identity in terms of appearing smart to others.

Smart people use their intelligence in many different ways, often practical.

Intellectuals who are not smart will limit the world to what they know, thus often preventing real progress in schools or government or anywhere.

Smart people who are not intellectuals may not know something at a given moment but if they apply themselves can master a subject often more than the intellectuals.

Palin is not an intellectual. If Palin is indeed very smart we'll see it when she puts herself back into a political interview and is challenged again with her knowledge of the world.

I think Obama is quite intelligent, but he is so caught up in his identity as an intellectual that he is almost entirely stifled from making any real decisions that might end up being wrong. His self-identity as an intellectual is very much in the way of him applying his intelligence. Which isn't very smart.

Palin is not an intellectual. That is good and bad. It is good because she can see reality in front of her face. It is bad because she doen't speak in short hand codes of Inellectual theories popular today...but that will be thrown ot in 20 years as the next theory captures the intellectuals curious minds. That was exposed by Katie Couric's interview that went for her jugular on a lack of intellectual curiosity. That's OK with me because the intellectuals never get anything right anyway except in their own minds which are open to mind control by the best illusionist of the day. I will vote for a reality grounded gutsy fighter anyday for a Presidential job. My intellectual friends are better for conversation and NPR's latest ridicule of non-intellectuals group think.

""But let's be honest if she wasn't hot she wouldn't be interesting.She would be Virginia Foxx from North Carolina."Haha! No words could be more true. Too bad that Debbie Scozzafava or whatever didn't look like Marissa Miller. Wingnuts would have created a martyr shrine for her by now."

And this shows you just don't get it. If she was a RINO, your side would love her, but she wouldnt be getting anywhere near the support from the conservatives, yet she would look exactly the same.

I think some intellectuals are very smart and some just have a lot of knowledge in a specific field, which is laudable, but not related to intelligence necessarily. Plenty of smart people are not intellectuals.

Amba: "The enthusiasm for Palin is so intense, and seems to self-evident to her admirers; the serious question is whether a majority of voters can be convinced to feel it."

In 2010 Palin has the chance to make her future by endorsing, but especially campaigning for, candidates with views that closely match her own.

If she can bring in enough votes to swing a few elections (or maybe even bring the House back under Republican control) then she becomes the most powerful politician in America. (Obama couldn't deliver anything in this year's elections. In next year's Democrats will be actively running away from him. Can you say "Jimmay"?)

NY23 was a test of that, and seriously, who cared about the Conservative candidate until Palin threw in her support? After which Hoffman suddenly grabbed the lead, which forced an obscure election front-and-center on the national scene. (It took a lot of Dem loot and face time - not to mention a RINO backstabbing - to pull it out of the fire, and maybe even then it didn't.)

We're all going to be seeing a lot of Palin over the next three years. I still think the Establishment Republicrats and Media Tinglers keep her out of the White House in '12, but she'll be there by '20.